Tuesday, March 15, 2011

If you care about your privacy, stay away from etsy

Through an unannounced change in the personal information etsy gives out, people's real names are now searchable on Google together with the items that people have bought. If you bought something on etsy and you put your real name on your account, then your purchasing history is available on etsy. I feel for the guy that purchased that butt plug, because his name has been posted in different forums.

Etsy says that this is no big deal, that they're working with Google to unindex those pages. But the problem isn't Google, the problem is etsy. The problem is that etsy made this change, to request your real name upon registration (without telling you that it was required) and then made it publicly available in feedback. Etsy also won't be informing users that they've done this.

In their rush to develop "social ecommerce", etsy has run over their user's privacy and their users. If etsy doesn't care about its buyers and sellers, why should buyers and sellers spend their money on etsy, where they violate their user's privacy at the drop of a hat and without apology and where they have no seller tools. It's time to stop buying and selling on etsy... it's been a good run, but it's time to go somewhere else.

1 comment:

PussDaddy said...

I wouldn't recommend any buyer go near it with a 10 foot pole.

PD